Where an exposed silver halide photographic light-sensitive material is processed in a color developer, an oxidation product of a color developing agent reacts with a dye-forming coupler to produce a dye, whereby a color image is formed.
In the photographic method, color reproduction is generally carried out by a subtractive color process to form a color image composed of yellow, magenta and cyan dyes.
A photographic coupler used for the formation of a yellow dye image includes acylacetanilide couplers; a magenta color image-forming coupler includes pyrazolone, pyrazolobenzimidazole, pyrazolotriazole and indazolone couplers; and cyan color image-forming coupler includes phenol and naphthol couplers.
Dye images formed by these couplers are requested to cause no fading and discoloration even when exposed to light over a long period of time and stored under high temperature/moisture conditions.
However, the phenol and naphthol couplers that have so far been used for the formation of cyan dyes still have the insufficient spectral absorption characteristics and heat, moisture and light resistances of the dye image formed therefrom. To improve the characteristics of a cyan dye image, various attempts including introduction of substituents have been made to date, but no compounds having wholly improved characteristics are yet available.